A new artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm is capable of manufacturing simulated video imagery that is indiscernible from reality, say researchers at Nvidia, a California-based tech company. AI developers at the company have released details of a new project that allows its AI to generate fake videos using only minimal raw input data. The technology can render a flawlessly realistic sequence showing what a sunny street looks like when it’s raining, for example, as well as what a cat or dog looks like as a different breed or even a person’s face with a different facial expression. And this is video — not photo.

For their work, researchers tweaked a familiar algorithm, known as a generative adversarial network (GAN), to allow their AI to create fresh visual data. The technique involves playing two neural networks against each other, but Nvidia’s new program requires far less input and no labeled datasets. In other words, AI is getting much, much better at mimicking reality.

Nvidia researcher Ming-Yu Liu says it would normally require multiple pairs of datasets for an ‘image translation’ AI to generate this kind of information. The new iteration of GAN is a massive improvement and allows for the unsupervised growth of AI functionality.

“[And] there are many applications,”says Liu. “For example, it rarely rains in California, but we’d like our self-driving cars to operate properly when it rains. We can use our method to translate sunny California driving sequences to rainy ones to train our self-driving cars.”

The researchers note that in addition to uses in self-driving cars, realtors could also use the technology to show prospective homebuyers what properties might look like in different seasons. One can imagine a myriad of similar applications that could be integrated into existing industries or spawn entirely new services.

Of course, there are also fears that the technology portends a dystopian future in which mega-corporations or governments can manipulate news media, eliminate or alter visual evidence of crimes, or even manufacture events that didn’t happen. We’re now beyond the phase of questioning whether something was photoshopped. Adding yet another wrinkle to the era of “fake news,” we may soon have to wonder whether or not video clips are AI generated.

Jake is a writer, filmmaker, investigative journalist, activist, search engine optimizer, and radio host. He is a contributing journalist for Anti-Media, covering automation, futurism, artificial intelligence, and fringe science. His short film “Machine Wash Warm” will premiere later this year. Jake received a B.A. from UCSC and currently lives in Portland, O.R., where he is working on a documentary, What Happened to Elisa Lam? He also hosts Anti-Media Radio show Thursdays at 8PM PST. Contact him at @overthemoonscifi or jake.anderson@theantimedia.org.

A former Facebook executive, who openly admits to not using social media, has come out about the role he played in “ripping apart the fabric of society.” Chamath Palihapitiya has publicly declared that he didn’t really understand “the consequences” of what he was doing.

This isn’t the first time a social media powerhouse has come forward with regret for helping create a social media platform either. Facebook’s first president, Sean Parker, opened up abouthis regrets over helping create social media as we now know it last month. Parker has said that social media creates “a social-validation feedback loop” by giving people “a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.”

“So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It [social media] is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, the former vice president of user growth. “I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because of the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” Parker said. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Palihapitiya, who is a millionaire thanks to his role in Facebook’s growth, also admitted it wasn’t about the Russian ads. We’ve done this damage to ourselves and fueled an addiction of sorts. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he told the audience said. “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.” And Palihapitiya admitted to feeling guilty for his role. “I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen. But I think the way we defined it was not like this.”

Palihapitiya said he doesn’t use social media because he “innately didn’t want to get programmed.” As for his kids: “They’re not allowed to use this sh*t.” That seemed to strike a nerve too. Palihapitiya admitted that social media is “programming” the behaviors of users. “Your behaviors—you don’t realize it but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you are willing to give up, how much of your intellectual independence,” he told the students in the crowd. “And don’t think, ‘Oh yeah, not me, I’m fucking genius, I’m at Stanford.’ You’re probably the most likely to f*cking fall for it. ‘Cause you are f*cking check-boxing your whole Goddamn life.”

The consequences of a social media addiction were unknown until recently. Now, it certainly seems almost as harrowing as an alcohol addiction. With one in six Americans now on anti-depressants and desperately seeking attention through social media, could Palihapitiya be onto something? Has social media damaged the social fabric of our society?

Geoengineering expert Dane Wigington is suing to get NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration) to give up its climate engineering information. But he’s hit a brick wall, and it’s all because the powers that be seek to hide this information from the public for a long as possible.

Wigington contends, “There is no hiding from what’s coming. . . . NOAA is not returning our FOIA’s, Freedom of Information Act requests.” He also says that this has been going on for 70 years, and was ramped up about 20 years ago. “This is the Orwellian world we live in,” said Wigington. A team of attorneys working with GeoengineeringWatch.org and Stop Geoengineering Minnesota is suing to get NOAA to release the information requested.

“They are legally required to give those to our attorneys, and they are not doing that. In fact, NOAA, in essence, flipped us the middle finger by sending back FOIA’s saying they know nothing about any sort of weather modification anywhere ever. Think how absurd this is when there are 300 regional weather modification programs that NOAA is required to sign off on every single year (in the contiguous 48 states). They are denying all of it. This is the biggest cover-up in human history, with the largest most extensive operation in history, with the cooperation of governments around the globe. That is not speculation. You have to look and understand the gravity of the situation that is unfolding. Countries around the globe, whatever you are focused on, if it’s not saving the life support systems of the planet, everything else amounts to arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. . . . This is the single most destructive endeavor ever launched by the human race. Mathematically, it’s the greatest threat we face short of nuclear catastrophe.” –Dane Wigington

According to USA Watch Dog,Wigington contends that the situation is much worse than most yet understand and climate engineering (not to be confused with the propagated and manufactured climate change which was invented in 1998 to cover this up as a “solution” to climate change) is a primary causal factor. Wigington explains, “Our situation is far more dire and immediate than anyone yet comprehends, and climate engineering is making it worse, not better. Official statistics say 20 million people could starve in the coming months, and that number will increase exponentially. The biosystems of the planet are imploding.”

“They (many disinformation sources) have to control the message, they almost exclusively use the term ‘chemtrails’ because that term leads to a dead end (conspiracy theory and hoax definitions). It’s not a scientific term, and they want us to use that term. You don’t see them using the geoengineering, climate engineering, solar radiation management and aerosol injection term because they (mainstream media and disinformation sources) don’t want people to understand the legitimacy of this issue. Why the Senate hearings? Because the elephant in the room is now all but impossible to hide, and they are trying to pacify populations until the last possible moment. They want to tell the population what they want to hear–that this is only a proposal… We have massive toxic aerosol, heavy metal spraying in our atmosphere that could not be more visible. It’s blotting out the sun. . . . These programs are completely out of control. . . .We are on the road to planetary omnicide. Climate engineering is the greatest and most immediate assault we face. Climate engineering, look at it like this, like the pharmaceutical approach to planet earth. Hide the symptoms even if you are making the overall situation exponentially worse. That’s what they are doing. We have had these radical whiplash weather scenarios where it goes from 80 to 90 degrees to snow in a day or two. This weather whiplash is not natural in any way, shape or form.”

The U.S. military agency known as DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is investing $100 million into so-called “genetic extinction technologies” that could be deployed to exterminate targeted human populations.

Emails acquired under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), “suggest that the US’s secretive Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has become the world’s largest funder of “gene drive” research,” reports The Guardian. “The use of genetic extinction technologies in bioweapons is the stuff of nightmares…” The Guardian reports.

The disclosure of this genetic extinction technology comes on the heels of Natural News blowing the whistle on a global eugenics program to target and exterminate people of African descent as part of an ongoing global depopulation agenda. In a one-hour video lecture published a few weeks ago, I detail the six vectors through which the weaponization of science and medicine is being deployed right now to exterminate blacks. See “The Science Agenda to Exterminate Blacks” for full details (full lecture video below).

Crispr gene editing technology becomes weaponized

The genetic doomsday weapon system now being developed by DARPA is based on the Crispr-Cas9 gene editing technique which allows simple, low-cost laboratories to achieve previously impossible genetic editing goals in almost any organism… including humans. “These might, for example, distort the sex-ratio of mosquitoes to effectively wipe out malarial populations,” explains The Guardian. But they could also be used to wipe out targeted genetic sub-species of humans, too.

“The dual use nature of altering and eradicating entire populations is as much a threat to peace and food security as it is a threat to ecosystems,” explained Jim Thomas, co-director of the ETC group, as reported by The Guardian. “Militarisation of gene drive funding may even contravene the Enmod convention against hostile uses of environmental modification technologies.”

Because much of the funding for modern-day science comes from military and government, scientists are finding themselves forced to work on “weaponization” programs or face a loss of funding. Via The Guardian:

Todd Kuiken, who has worked with the GBIRd programme, which receives $6.4m from Darpa, said that the US military’s centrality to gene tech funding meant that “researchers who depend on grants for their research may reorient their projects to fit the narrow aims of these military agencies”.

The weaponization of gene drive technology — turning genetics into a doomsday weapon — is widely known to be capable of spreading through a population and causing deliberate extinction. “Think of it as a way to supercharge evolution, forcing a genetic modification to spread through an entire population in just a few generations,” reports WIRED. The technology is so potentially devastating that former national intelligence director James Clapper classified gene drive technology as one of many “weapons of mass destruction and proliferation,” according to WIRED, which also said:

Taking into account things like how often Crispr screws up and the likelihood of protective mutations arising, their work shows how gene drives could be ruthlessly aggressive.

Humanity has reached a tipping point of developing technology so profound that it can destroy the human race; yet this rise of “science” has in no way been matched by a rise in consciousness or ethics. Today, science operates with total disregard for the future of life on Earth, and it scoffs at the idea of balancing scientific “progress” with caution, ethics or reasonable safeguards. Unbridled experiments like GMOs have unleashed self-replicating genetic pollution that now threatens the integrity of food crops around the world, potentially threatening the global food supply.

In an accompanying infographic, which I developed and published in 2012, I wrote:

SCIENCE must exist to serve the long-term interests of humanity, not to serve the short-term profits of corporations. To protect the future of life on Earth, science must operate under the Precautionary Principle.

In that infographic, republished below, I categorized genetic engineering technology as a “Level IV” hazard to humanity because it is self-replicating. Other risks posed to humanity by out-of-control science and named in the infographic include artificial intelligence, nano-technology, pollinator disruption chemicals, weaponized vaccines and nuclear weapons. Since 2012, we’ve seen devastating effects on humanity and the global ecosystem from nearly all of these vectors:

Watch my “science agenda” video lecture below to learn more:

Mike Adams (aka the “Health Ranger“) is a best selling author (#1 best selling science book on Amazon.com called “Food Forensics“), an environmental scientist, a patent holder for a cesium radioactive isotope elimination invention, a multiple award winner for outstanding journalism, a science news publisher and influential commentator on topics ranging from science and medicine to culture and politics. Follow his videos, podcasts, websites and science projects at the links below.

With the exponential growth of machine learning, automation, and artificial intelligence, a certain anxiety over future job losses and human obsolescence has crept into popular culture. What’s to stop artificial intelligence from replacing humans across the board? Well, one might respond, they’ll still need humans to create them. Right?

Not necessarily.

According to researchers at Google Brain, their newest artificial intelligence (AI) creation, AutoML, is not only capable of creating its own AIs, it is better at it than humans. The project, an early example of recursively self-improving AI, involved the use of reinforcement learning to automate the development of machine learning templates.

AutoML (“ML” is short for machine learning) acted as a controller neural network that spawned a child AI called NASNet. AutoML played the role of supervisor and teacher for its child AI, overseeing its ability to perform a specific task over and over again. In this case, NASNet was charged with real-time object detection, which it completed with record efficiency.

According to CEO Sundar Pichai, AutoML solves one of the most intractable problems for deep learning software engineers, which is selecting the best architecture for a neural network.

Google’s researchers say the development of computer vision algorithms will not only help to expand the field — which, by some estimates, has only 10,000 people worldwide with the ability to write such complex mathematical algorithms — but that it could also lead to huge improvements in self-driving cars and even enhanced assistance for visually impaired humans.

While recursively self-improving AI will lead to the exponential growth of AI, experts say that democratizing the field of AI by allowing non-experts to develop AI applications will lead to human growth as well.

“We hope that the larger machine learning community will be able to build on these models to address multitudes of computer vision problems we have not yet imagined.”

In a time when anxiety over automated weapons and surveillance — which could both be dramatically strengthened by next-generation algorithmic AI — has reached fever pitch, perhaps more humans becoming engaged with AI is a good thing. With a “seed AI” such as AutoML taking care of the heavy-lifting, smart machines making new smart machines could help humans grow smarter in the process. It seems we’ve figured out the solution to the shortage of AI experts — create them.

Jake is a writer, filmmaker, investigative journalist, activist, search engine optimizer, and radio host. He is a contributing journalist for Anti-Media, covering automation, futurism, artificial intelligence, and fringe science. His short film “Machine Wash Warm” will premiere later this year. Jake received a B.A. from UCSC and currently lives in Portland, O.R., where he is working on a documentary, What Happened to Elisa Lam? He also hosts Anti-Media Radio show Thursdays at 8PM PST. Contact him at @overthemoonscifi or jake.anderson@theantimedia.org.